Compression-based 3D texture mapping for real-time rendering

While 2D texture mapping is one of the most effective of the rendering tech niques that make 3D objects appear visually interesting, it often suffers f rom visual artifacts produced when 2D image patterns are wrapped onto the s urfaces of objects with arbitrary shapes. On the other hand, 3D texture map ping generates highly natural visual effects in which objects appear carved from lumps of materials rather than laminated with thin sheets as in 2D te xture mapping, Storing 3D texture images in a table for fast mapping comput ations, instead of evaluating procedures on the Ay, however, has been consi dered impractical due to the extremely high memory requirement. In this pap er, we present anew effective method for 3D texture mapping designed for re al-time rendering of polygonal models. Our scheme attempts to resolve the p otential texture memory problem by compressing 3D textures using a wavelet- based encoding method, The experimental results on various nontrivial 3D te xtures and polygonal models show that high compression rates are achieved w ith few visual artifacts in the rendered images and a small impact on rende ring time. The simplicity of our compression-based scheme will make it easy to implement practical 3D texture mapping in software/hardware rendering s ystems including real-time 3D graphics APIs such as OpenGL and Direct3D, (C ) 2000 Academic Press.